@Whale said:
jezzie – the very first thing that your Owners Corporation (O/C) needs to do, like right now, is write to the Auction Agent to formally advise that alterations to both the lot and to the common property (include known details) have been undertaken by the current Proprietor without the prior consent of the O/C, that the matter is currently before the NSW Administrative and Appeals Tribunal (NCAT), and that unless an appropriate Special By-Law is Registered prior to settlement then the O/C requires any future Proprietor to at their expense to restore the common property to its pre-renovation state.You may want to obtain some legal assistance with the drafting of the above; perhaps have your E/C Secretary or Strata Manager contact one of FlatChat’s sponsors HERE.
I am just reiterating this first part of what Whale wrote because it is vitally important that you get this on the record in some form NOW. If you can also hold a quick EC meeting and have the letter accepted into the minutes, so much the better. This puts the onus straight back on to any future purchaser’s solicitors or strata search company to inform them and they can’t come back in the future and say they didn’t know. That in turn should get your recalcitrant owner to do something about this.
You could also get a builder to give you an estimate of how much it would cost to reinstate all the common property so you can put a financial figure on this and present it to them as a debt against the future sale of their property.
You don’t have to have everything all legal and ship shape at this stage. All you need is to make a valid claim and that will cause enough confusion to undermine the owner’s efforts to make this a clean sale. They seem determined to profit at their neighbours’ collective expense and you are entitled to do whatever is required to prevent this.